Digital Commons Network^™

Women And Children First, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In the lore of the sea there are few events that have so exemplified heroism and self-sacrifice as the acts of the soldiers and sailors of the British ship Birkenhead when it sank in 1852. The soldiers of the 74th Highland Regiment stood at attention on deck (with the band playing) “while the women and children were saved and the captain very properly went down with his ship.” More than 450 lives were lost, and the phrase “women and children first” was introduced into the language as part of the “Birkenhead drill.” As Kipling put it in his poem …

Medicine, Death, And The Criminal Law, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Errors in medicine are common and are at least partly responsible for the deaths of 180,000 patients a year. There is increasing concern about medical errors and the steps that should be taken to prevent them.Until recently, hospitals have addressed errors after the fact, through mortality and morbidity conferences, incident reports, and the like, rather than before the fact, through attention to systems defects and prevention. Likewise, medical-malpractice litigation can be filed only after an injury has occurred. Malpractice litigation is intended to create incentives to improve the quality of medical care by making physicians and hospitals accountable for their …

Reframing The Debate On Health Care Reform By Replacing Our Metaphors, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Metaphors matter, as our sterile debate on the fi-nancing of health insurance demonstrates so well. In that debate the traditional metaphor of American medicine, the military metaphor, was displaced by the market metaphor in public discourse. Metaphors, which entice us to understand and experience “one kind of thing in terms of another . . . play a central role in the construction of social and political reality.” The market metaphor proved virtually irresistible in the public arena and led Congress to defer to market forces to “reform” the financing of health insurance in the United States.

Insurance Risk Classification After Mcgann: Managing Risk Efficiently In The Shadow Of The Ada, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

A significant part of the health insurance debate which gripped the country during the first two years of President Clinton's administration focused on the critical shortage of employer-sponsored health insurance for disabled, br high risk, employees. Indeed, President Clinton's promise of universal access in connection with the promotion of his health care plan is apparently designed to ensure that the increasingly popular employer practice of excluding high risk employees becomes obsolete. In the meantime, while the merits of the Clinton plan and its competitors are debated, individuals like John McGann-working and insured--continue to discover that like their health, their insurance …

Illusion And Reality In International Forum Selection, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

The text of a legal rule is often less important than the context of its interpretation and application. If a dispute between an American buyer and a French seller were to come before a French court, the buyer might be apprehensive not so much from any fearful oddity of French law, but because the adjudicatory procedure arguably gave the French side a "home court advantage." In some other countries, the integrity or independence of the judiciary may also be a matter of concern. In an international transaction, the absence of any reasonably neutral forum with compulsory jurisdiction makes the consequences …

Inviolability And Privacy: The Castle, The Sanctuary, And The Body, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the idea and imagery of inviolability. I use a trilogy of terms-the castle, the sanctuary, and the body-to illuminate different loci of inviolability and to show how notions of sacredness and sanctity undergird the legal protection of inviolability. These images, familiar from privacy jurisprudence, provide a useful lens through which to examine the association between inviolability and gender. Familiar feminist critiques suggest that concepts such as privacy have served to deny, rather than to secure, inviolability for women and women's bodies. I explore the interplay of inviolability and privacy in some prominent feminist accounts of sexuality, and …

The Case Against Regulating The Market For Contingent Employment, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Class Wars: The Dilemma Of The Mass Tort Class Action, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Legal change – like organic evolution – can occur at varying paces. Long periods of gradual evolution are sometimes punctuated by brief moments of rapid, irregular change. Recent developments in class action practice bear witness to this phenomenon: during the 1990s, evolution has given way to mutation. At least with respect to mass torts, the development of the class action had been slow and halting. Well into the 1980s, federal courts uniformly resisted attempts to certify such mass tort class actions, largely out of concern that the interests of the individual litigant would be submerged within any large-scale proceeding. By …

Reflections On A Case (Of Motherhood), Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

She surveyed my office for signs of conspiracy. We had had two or three telephone conversations that had conveyed my ambivalence about representing her. A former colleague had urged her to call the clinic for help but I was reluctant to accept her case for the clinic: we rarely represented foster parents and the procedural complexity of the case convinced me that I would be unable to assign students to represent this client so late in the semester. I was resigned, however, to help her find a lawyer, both because a former colleague had sent her and because the snippets …

Paint-By-Numbers Tax Lawmaking, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

Although their meaning and contours have long been controversial, the general criteria for evaluating changes in tax law enjoy both stability and consensus. At least since Adam Smith, there has been virtually universal agreement that the nation's tax law should be fair, economically efficient, and simple to comply with and to administer. Tax law changes should be designed to make the law more equitable, easier to comply with, more conducive to economic growth, and less likely to interfere with private economic decisionmaking.

Precisely what these criteria imply for policymaking is controversial, however. Fairness is often said to require that people …

U. S. Social Welfare Policy, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Alstott's paper tells an important story about the current moment in American federalism as interpreted through the lens of the social welfare system. From its beginning in 1935, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was the most important intellectual ingredient in the American commitment (or not) to poor families. AFDC was called an exercise in "cooperative federalism." States established and administered programs, receiving reimbursement for roughly fifty percent of their expenditures from the national government, which, however, imposed certain programmatic conditions.

Since the Republicans took control of Congress in the 1994 elections, Congress has emphasized two themes: cutting …

European Community Law From A U.S. Perspective, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Although less than forty years have passed since the founding of the European Economic Community (now the European Community), the lifetime of the Community is well marked temporally. The term of each Commission furnishes a convenient time-line for measuring the Community's progress in legal integration. Since the 1970s, each year has been punctuated by two or more "summit" meetings of heads of state or government. These summits not only are key markings in their own right, but also furnish an occasion for additional monitoring of the Community's state of health. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the Community submitted …

Free Trade, Regulatory Competition And The Autonomous Market Fallacy, Joel R. Paul

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Parents As Fiduciaries, Elizabeth S. Scott, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Traditionally, the law has deferred to the rights of biological parents in regulating the parent-child relationship. More recently, as the emphasis of legal regulation has shifted to protecting children's interests, critics have targeted the traditional focus on parents' rights as impeding the goal of promoting children's welfare. Some contemporary scholars argue instead for a "child-centered perspective," in contrast to the current regime under which biological parents continue to have important legal interests in their relationship with their children. The underlying assumption of this claim is that the rights of parents and the interests of children often are conflicting, and that …

Dolan V. City Of Tigard: Constitutional Rights As Public Goods, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

When may the government require that citizens waive their constitutional rights in order to obtain benefits the government has no obligation to provide them? The answer, given by the so-called "doctrine" of unconstitutional conditions, is that sometimes the government may condition discretionary benefits on the waiver of rights, and sometimes it may not. The Supreme Court has never offered a satisfactory rationale for this doctrine, or why it "roams about constitutional law like Banquo's ghost, invoked in some cases, but not in others."

The unconstitutional conditions doctrine directs courts not to enforce certain contracts that waive constitutional rights. Perhaps it …

On Resegregating The Worlds Of Statute And Common Law, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

In the early afternoon of a humid, 97 degree summer day, James Gottshall was part of a crew of mostly 50- to 60-year-old men replacing track for Conrail. Michael Norvick, the crew supervisor, pressed the men to finish the work. He discouraged observance of the scheduled breaks. Richard Johns collapsed in the heat; Norvick ordered the men back to work as soon as a cold compress had revived him. Five minutes later Johns collapsed again, the victim of a heart attack. Gottshall began 40 minutes of ultimately fruitless cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Johns, his friend for 15 years. Norvick was unable …

Commentary: Policy Implications, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Rediscovering Client Decisionmaking: The Impact Of Role-Playing, Mary Zulack

Faculty Scholarship

There are more things of importance to representing clients than are disclosed through a typical interview or counseling session, even a session undertaken by a lawyer earnestly attempting to hear rather than ignore the client. We lawyers are often vividly aware, when we pause to contemplate the point, that we do not know all we should about our clients. We may also believe that we have great gulfs of knowledge and experience to cross in order to hear and understand any particular client. Further, we fear that our ability to cross these gulfs is limited by the human, and lawyerly, …

Antitrust Issues In The Joint Purchasing Of Health Care, Clark C. Havighurst

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Square Peg In A Vicious Circle: Stephen Breyer's Optimistic Prescription For The Regulatory Mess, Eric J. Gouvin

Faculty Scholarship

This Article reviews the book by Supreme Court Justice, Steven G. Breyer, "Breaking The Vicious Circle: Toward Effective Risk Regulation. " The Author discusses this book's most significant contribution that draws attention to the current regulatory regime's systemic problems, thereby encouraging serious discussion about how to "reinvent" the regulatory process. Breyer courageously points out that the political legitimacy of the process rests to some degree on the effectiveness of its product. This Review outlines the systemic problems and the "vicious circle" identified by Justice Breyer and then proceeds to review his proposed solution. The final part presents several criticisms of …

Of Communism, Treason, And Addiction: An Evaluation Of Novel Challenges To The Military's Anti-Gay Policy, Taylor Flynn

Faculty Scholarship

A recent wave of decisions have held unconstitutional the exclusion of lesbians, bisexuals,and gay men in the military when the only evidence of same-sex "conduct" is the servicemember's self-identification as gay. These courts, as well as some pro-equality commentators, have drawn upon three criminal law models by characterizing same-sex orientation as akin to a status and a form of political expression.

The first model relies upon Robinson v. California and Powell v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court announced the constitutional impermissibility of criminalizing the status of addiction to narcotics and alcohol. In the context of military litigation, this model …

Public Institutions Of Culture And The First Amendment: The New Frontier, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

The general subject of my lecture today is the relationship between the First Amendment and public institutions of culture, which I take to be those sponsored and supported by the state with the clear purpose of preserving and promoting high culture in the United States. These include universities, museums, theaters, libraries, public broadcasting networks, programs for art in public places, and the national endowments for the arts and the humanities. All of these institutions or programs are vested with the responsibility of insuring the preservation of high human achievement in the areas to which they are devoted (knowledge, art, music, …

Race And Representation After Miller V. Johnson, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers the Supreme Court's two approaches to race and representation: the constrained proportionality of the vote-dilution cases and the strict scrutiny of racially motivated districting. Part I traces the development of these two doctrines, examines their conceptual underpinnings, and considers some of the questions the Court will have to answer as it elaborates its new approach to the use of race in the design of electoral systems.

Part II explores the tension between the Court's two approaches. The concern with racial motivation proceeds from an underlying normative assumption about the place of race in politics that is profoundly …

Legal Enforcement Of Morality, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In modern Western political and legal thought, the subject of legal enforcement of morality is narrower than the literal coverage of those terms. That is because much legal enforcement of morality is uncontroversial and rarely discussed. Disagreement arises only when the law enforces aspects of morality that do not involve protecting others from fairly direct harms. More precisely, people raise questions about legal requirements (1) to perform acts that benefit others, (2) to refrain from acts that cause indirect harms to others, (3) to refrain from acts that cause harm to themselves, ( 4) to refrain from acts that offend …

Greater Representation For California Consumers–Fluid Recovery, Consumer Trust Funds, And Representative Actions, James R. Mccall, Patricia Sturdevant, Laura Kaplan, Gail Hillebrand

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Mapping The Labyrinth Of Scientific Evidence, David L. Faigman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Private Voluntary Standard–Setting, The International Organization For Standardization, And International Environmental Lawmaking, Naomi Roht-Arriaza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Law And Labor In The New Global Economy: Through The Lens Of United States Federalism, Mark Barenberg

Faculty Scholarship

The heightened economic globalization of the last quarter century presents a welter of new questions for legal scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. In many specialized fields, lawyers and academics are reskilling in comparative and international law in response to the growing importance of the transnational linkages and competition facing economic and regulatory actors in the United States. Concurrently, dramatic economic and political "transitions" in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe have created legal uncertainties and innovations that compound the challenges of transnationalization. Issues of labor and employment law are at the center of both of these epochal transformations – globalization and …

Integrating The "Underclass": Confronting America's Enduring Apartheid, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's American Apartheid argues that housing integration has inappropriately disappeared from the national agenda and is critical to remedying the problems of the so-called "underclass." Reviewer Olati Johnson praises the authors' refusal to dichotomize race and class and the roles both play in creating and maintaining housing segregation. However, she argues, Massey and Denton fail to examine critically either the concept of the underclass or the integration ideology they espouse. Specifically, she contends, the authors fail to confront the limits of integration strategies in providing affordable housing or combating the problem of tokenism. Massey and Denton …

This State Will Soon Have Plenty Of Laws - Lessons From One Hundred Years Of Codification In Montana, Andrew P. Morriss

Faculty Scholarship

Part II of this Article briefly sketches the codification movement in the United States and the conditions in Montana in the 1890s. The remainder of Part II tells the story of Montana's adoption of the Civil, Criminal, Political, and Civil Procedure Codes of 1895. Part III examines in detail the subsequent treatment of some of the employment law sections of the Civil Code. Part IV draws lessons from codification and the Codes' application for future legal reform efforts.